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Planetary News: Education and Outreach (2008)Special Coverage of the 2008 European Planetary Science Congress from The Planetary Society WeblogBy Doug EllisonSeptember 22-26, 2008 Doug Ellison posted these reports on the sessions at the third European Planetary Science Congress to The Planetary Society Weblog. His reports are gathered here into one document. Ellison is the founder and administrator of the online forum unmannedspaceflight.com and an advocate for public involvement in the exploration of our solar system. September 22: Arrival and Mars' North Pole September 22: Arrival and Mars' north poleAnother year, another Europlanet. This time it's in the northwest German city of Münster, at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität (that’s the University to you and me). It's a stunning venue, somewhat compromised by the large tent erected to house the poster sessions.
As you will have heard Emily and me both lament from conferences before: until we figure out how to clone ourselves, we can only see on session at a time. Europlanet this year runs five sessions concurrently, so four-fifths of the content immediately flies out the window. Because of that, and because of my bias toward presentations on subjects that find interesting and I think I can blog about, I would urge you to review the abstracts at the EPSC Website. Two-page abstracts abound, and in some cases cover every ounce of information that will be presented in the oral presentations anyway. I’m going to try and pick one or two presentations each half-day, and blog those. On Wednesday are the Outreach sessions, in which I’m presenting on the outreach done by the Mars Exploration Rover team that the amateur community has leveraged into what I call ‘Bootleg Postcards’. I picked “Mars Polar Deposits and First Results from Phoenix” as my first session. However, there were no Phoenix results at all. Truthfully, I don’t expect the good stuff from Phoenix to make it out to conferences or publications for another few months. However, Kathryn Fishbaugh presented a paper on northern polar deposits that have more than a little to do with a pertinent terrestrial topic: climate. The polar caps are links to climate and atmosphere. They are records of recent climatic change. To understand that record we need to understand the layers, but this quickly raises two interesting points. Firstly, a layer is itself defined by the method used to observe it. Layers seen in radar may or may not be the same as layers seen in imagery. Layers seen in Viking orbiter imagery show large stripes, but imagery from [Mars Global Surveyor] MOC and [Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter] HiRISE shows some of these stripes to be a collection of many stripes themselves. Secondly, when we see imagery, is the brightness due to the inherent albedo of the material in question, or the illumination it is receiving, or the slope on which it is found? This is especially pertinent on the steep slopes where the polar layering is found, as there are lots of elevation changes involved, which can affect the apparent brightness of the layering. To back out from the elevation, they have generated a digital elevation model from HiRISE imagery, similar to that which I used to animate the Columbia hills a few months ago. Randy Kirk, from the United States Geological Survey, has been producing elevation models from pairs of orbital images for some time with great results from MOC, and now HiRISE. With this one-meter-scale elevation model, they can calculate out the impact of illumination on the terrain and produce a map of actual surface brightness. This raises one point at which care must be taken. Because (although this is not an especially good analogy) in many places the shape of the layers replicates ripples one might see on a sea bed, one must ask: are we looking at actual layering, or something else? To truly ensure they are looking at layers and not localized erosion features they take tracks thru the layers and average out multiple tracks taken at several locations on the same slopes. Genuine features will then stand out above the local noise floor caused by erosion. But at HiRISE's highest resolution of 30 centimetres per pixel resolution, the layers are not sharp-edged. This means we either have layers that have gradual transitions, or there is a thin localized mantle of dust and ice that blurs the contacts between layers. This means we have a human element to the measurement of the layers. When different people measure the layers, they get thicknesses between 5 and 10 metres (so that's a human error of ±2 meters), with layers 20 to 30 metres apart.
Two current models that take into account the precession and obliquity of Mars begin to match the pattern of marker beds and smaller layers, but neither match them especially well, giving different ages for the layering of between two and ten million years. [Tying variations in ice layer thickness to variations in orbital parameters has been done successfully for Earth; Google "Milankovitch Cycles" if you want to read more about that. --ESL] Tying the layering to orbital parameters isn’t going to be straightforward, so future work involving details of stratigraphic columns and especially the linking of marker beds to radar layers seen by [Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter] SHARAD and [Mars Express] MARSIS will be essential in pulling the story apart and understanding what the layered deposits of Mars are telling us. That’s all I managed to get of the morning session - but I thought I’d finish each blog entry with a random paper from EPSC just to demonstrate the diversity of what’s being presented. The first one is guaranteed to save the eyesight of grad students everywhere: a Portuguese group's presentation on automated crater counting techniques (PDF, 576k). September 22: To be bold, be small (part 1)Monday afternoon saw an interesting series of talks about miniaturized spacecraft, some planned for the future, and one a retrospective from the past.
Solar power is essentially useless on Titan, so can be ignored. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) similar to that planned for the MSL Mars rover can provide around 120 Watts of energy at a mass of around 40 kilograms (90 pounds). The yet-to-be-flown Stirling generator can provide a little less, 110 Watts, for 30 kilograms (70 pounds) of mass. [Here and here are a couple of posts about modern RTGs and Stirlings. --ESL] And some small-scale thermoelectric generators yet to be fully developed can generate around 4 Watts for a few kilograms. Batteries are great for short life. But they're heavy. Of Huygens' 320 kilograms (710 pounds), 60 kilograms (130 pounds) was batteries; in fact, nearly an entire "deck" of the Huygens design was dedicated to batteries and power management. The problem is, an extensive payload like what one might want to take to Titan needs a lot of power. Lots of power has to come from lots of batteries or an RTG or Stirling power supply. That dramatically increases the mass of the lander. That means a bigger parachute, and perhaps some means of shock-absorption for landing (airbags, for example). Hence, adding instruments with power demands snowballs into making the entire spacecraft heavier. That said, Lebley thinks that they could build a vehicle with similar ability to Huygens for about 100 kilograms (220 pounds) today, and, if it were dispatched from Titan orbit, perhaps as little as 65 kilograms (140 pounds). (This involves reducing the descent time, and integrating the antennae with the backshell of the entry capsule so as to throw away fewer parts on the way to the ground.) Power, however, remains the major constraint when designing for a Titan landing. With that in mind, Lebley is pushing for Europe to invest in low-power, low-mass technologies useful not only at Titan, but also Mars. Next up: a student project based on the rules of the Google Lunar X-Prize. Barend Buutfeld talked about the "Reach for the Moon" project from Delft University. They took two groups of ten students, and in ten weeks came up with a design for a mission which could deliver two small rovers to the surface of the moon.
It’s easy for students to draw boxes and rovers and tracks and landers and arm-wave about how to do it. But I have to give this team a lot of credit. Not only did Buutfeld stand up quite well to questions from the floor, but he also highlighted one significant problem. Go to Youtube, and search for 'The Moon.' The first five videos are not from the moon. Hopefully this team, or a team like it, will be able to put something together and achieve the goals of the Google Lunar X-Prize. One serious problem remains, however: money. Despite a prize fund of 20 to 30 million dollars, this team estimated the total cost to build this mission would be on the order of six times the value of the prize. To close this entry, another randomly selected paper: Origin of Titan and its atmosphere" (PDF format, 191k). September 22: To be bold, be small (part 2)After presentations by Dennis Lebley and Barend Buutfeld (summarized in the previous entry), Ralph Lorenz from the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University gave two short presentations about very small missions: one from the past, but before that, one from the future. I’ll put my hands up and admit that the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) gets my vote over the Jovian proposals for the next outer planets flagship mission (fortunately, my vote doesn’t count). [The goal of the next outer planets flagship mission is the subject of much current research and debate; the decision is currently between missions to Titan, Europa, and the Jupiter system. --ESL] I’ll talk about the TSSM proposal later, but the baseline is for a lander called Mare Explorer -- think Huygens 2.0, targeted for a lake -- plus a hot-air balloon. They'd both ride piggyback on a large orbiter to Saturn and be deployed to the surface. Lorenz has suggested that the lander include a small aerial vehicle that he entitled the Titan Bumblebee. Whenever a new type of spacecraft happens, usually it first happens small, and often as a secondary payload. Consider planetary rovers. Whilst a "Viking 3" plan for a tracked version of the Viking lander was proposed in 1976, it took 21 years until Sojourner demonstrated roving on another planet for the first time. Then it took only seven more years for a pair of vehicles like Spirit and Opportunity to arrive. Now, 12 years after 10.2 kilograms (22.5 pounds) of Sojourner wowed the world in 1997, we're a year or so from the launch of a 775-kilogram (1,710-pound) rover called MSL. The Vega balloons, which floated in Venus' atmosphere in June 11 and 15, 1985, rode piggyback on a mission to Halley’s comet. No one is prepared to spend a fortune flying a big version of a new type of vehicle. So, what would you do for the first aircraft at Titan? Titan has a thick atmosphere (50% more dense than our own), but only a seventh the gravity of Earth. In terms of aviation it's superb, albeit a little on the cold side. Set a limit of one kilogram (two pounds). If half the mass were reserved for lithium thionyl chloride (Li-SOCl2) batteries, you would have around 200 Watt-hours of power. So, you can run 200 Watts for an hour, 50 for 4 hours, and so on. The real challenge, however, it to keep it warm. Assuming a 400-centimeter-square surface area, a vehicle would loose around 30 Watts of energy in an atmosphere at just 94 degrees Kelvin. Flying at high speed could mean a further 15 Watts because of the airflow around. Thus, figuring out such a vehicle's maximum range involves a trade among how quickly you fly, how much energy that means you dump into the vehicle, how much energy you need to spend keeping warm, and how much energy you loose through heat. The maths comes out at around 10 meters per second (22 miles per hour), and the vehicle could cover around 100 kilometers (60 miles). That would be enough to cross one of the average lakes on Titan, or to guarantee visiting a specific target from wherever it lands within a targeted ellipse. At an altitude of two kilometers (1.2 miles), the horizon would be 101 kilometers (6e miles) away, so the aircraft could relay back to the lander, and then the lander on to the orbiter overhead. A simple camera and meteorological instruments could be fitted, and whilst GPS or compass-based navigation isn’t possible, a beacon on the lander could provide a primitive means of direction-finding; even a small sun-sensing camera could give attitude information accurate to about a degree. And it need not be an aircraft. Such a vehicle may end up looking like a helicopter, a ducted-fan vehicle, or even a tilt rotor vehicle. Most exciting of all, it’s small enough to be a university project on the scale of a cube-sat, with various universities building vehicles and having Earth-based fly-offs, with the winner flying all the way to Titan. And why call it Bumblebee? Because as explained in the book Bumblebee Economics it's a tradeoff, in using energy to keep yourself warm, but spending energy to be mobile to go and get more energy. The economics of energy is something you have to manage if you’re an aircraft on Titan, or stuck on Earth, as a bumblebee. Lorenz then moved on to a brief retrospective of the Deep Space 2 microprobes. For those that were not around to experience them, this was a nice reminder of a mission that is now nearly 10 years in the past (amusingly highlighted by the fact that some of the slides' content originated from viewgraphs, not PowerPoint) . Part of the New Millennium program that included Deep Space 1, Deep Space 2 was a pair of tiny hard-impacting landers called Scott and Amundsen that rode piggyback on Mars Polar Lander. At a cost of only $28 million, they were "faster better cheaper" gone perhaps a little too far. The design weighed 3.6 kilograms (7.9 pounds) in total, and included self-righting aeroshells about 35 centimeters in diameter and 28 centimeters tall. No parachutes, airbags or retro-rockets were used; the entire craft was designed simply to slam into the ground at around 200 meters per second (450 miles per hour), causing the ceramic aeroshell to smash into pieces. The lander inside was supposed to then split into two pieces. The back part was to stay at the surface (pulling as much as 80,000 gees on deceleration!) and contained batteries (developed specifically for this mission), communications equipment, the computer, and a test of a flexible solar cell. In the middle, a "forebody" was to slow less quickly, pulling "only" 30,000 gees, and stop deeper in the ground. A flexible cable linked the two parts. The acceleration data itself would be one scientific investigation. A tiny suite of instruments in the forebody was to measure temperature and sample the soil for water content.
The main lesson: test, test, test. For Deep Space 2, no full-up end-to-end test, including an air-cannon test impact, followed by simulated communications, was done. This is in part because the constraint on the spacecraft's volume was so tight that there was no room for fasteners and attachments to connect the pieces of the spacecraft. Instead, they were often glued or snapped together, leaving no other means but destruction to take the vehicles apart again. Several air-canon impact tests were carried out, and a few were instrumented in ways similar to the flight hardware. However, in those tests that were instrumented, data from the probes could only be downlinked after they were dug out of the test range and disassembled. Not once was a full mission simulation -- an impact followed by testing of the instruments and radio communications -- carried out. To date, no successful hard-impacting landers have flown, but they remain an interesting and potentially scientifically valuable option for future missions for many targets in the solar system. [If you're interested in the concept of penetrator landers, you might be interested in this and this, posts from Lou Friedman on the testing of a Japanese lunar penetrator. --ESL] For those following along at home and expecting lots of Mercury news today: sorry to disappoint, but I attended most of the Mercury talks this morning, and there was nothing new. It was oral versions of the Science magazine results that you will have seen posted on this site already. Tomorrow is the outreach day, so I have to go and get my presentation ready! Random EPSC paper to close this entry: "Preservation of organic matter in the STONE 6 artificial meteorite experiment." (PDF, 519k) September 24: To reach out, let people inWednesday is outreach day here in Münster, which means I was giving my oral presentation “Bootleg Postcards: The unofficial biographies of Spirit and Opportunity”. For reasons I will explain below, I ended up giving it twice. The outreach sessions started with another great overview of the CASSIE Web-based application. Now on version 2, it lets you ride along with Cassini, explore the spacecraft and the main moons of the Saturnian system. It is fantastic to see the pitching, rolling, and yawing the spacecraft goes through to switch from taking observations, to transmitting to Earth and so on. I could spend hours (in fact, I just did!) watching the extended tour unfold. Go and try it, and imagine the same technology applying to future missions. The potential is enormous, and Alice Wessen's Cassini outreach office should be credited for seeing the potential and letting Kevin Hussey and his team develop a tool like this.
Jane Houston-Jones moved the proceedings along by discussing the Saturn Observation Campaign, a network of more than 400 amateur astronomers from 54 countries around the world who organize Saturn observing evenings for the general public. I was surprised to see reports of star parties around the entire globe - India, Benin, Vietnam and even Iraq. If you’ve never seen Saturn through a telescope, find an event and go and do it, because it really is an awe-inspiring sight. Don’t let the imagery from Cassini lull you into thinking you’ve seen all Saturn has to offer; it’s something special even through a modest telescope with your own eyes. Next up, Veronica McGregor from Media Relations at JPL discussed new media. For more than 35,000 people, Veronica is the voice of the Phoenix Mars lander via the MarsPhoenix Twitter page -- I hope I don’t shatter any illusions in telling people that it’s not actually the spacecraft writing these updates. Veronica writes them in the first person simply because “I did...” takes fewer of the 140-character Twitter limit than “The spacecraft was commanded to...”. With circulation of traditional print media and viewership of television news down, people are getting their news in other ways. It started out as an experiment in keeping 3,000 or so people informed about the Phoenix landing via Twitter’s SMS service. Now with more than ten times that, it’s the sixth most popular Twitter feed in the world, and still growing at an impressive rate. What Veronica has discovered is that Twitter works best as a dialogue. She takes feedback from other Twitterers, and answers popular questions in the form of Twitter feeds, giving a roughly 50/50 ratio of ‘news’ and ‘answers’. It may have developed by accident, but this means of engaging with the public is both highly effective, and low on time required. After Veronica, my talk was moved up from an after-lunch session to tack onto the end of the morning session. Some people arrived after lunch expecting to see my talk, and so chatting to Mike Evans in the foyer of the venue, I was hunted down by Jean-Pierre Lebreton who asked if I would briefly give it again. Some might call it an administrative oversight; I’d prefer to consider it an encore.
You will have seen many of the forum members' creations posted by Emily here, and the very fact that she thinks that a worthwhile thing to do justifies that policy of releasing the raw imagery so that people can produce the mosaics, animations and other products that people seem to enjoy. After highlighting some of the creations (including the brilliant Midnight Mars Browser), I posted one line of text in the middle of an empty slide: What good is all this?
Seriously, what good is a bunch of space geeks going nuts for a bunch of raw imagery and talking about it amongst themselves? When New Scientist posted a news item about a science paper suggesting an open puddle of water on the surface of Mars those enthusiasts recognized the image, provided a calibrated color version, put it into context and demonstrated the reasons why that paper was wrong, rapidly, clearly, fully, and without NASA / JPL having to get involved. When the news media posted a story about the little Yeti-like-rock that Spirit saw at the edge of Home Plate, it was an enthusiast who provided the perfect antidote in the form of a large image highlighting all the other little rocks that looked like one thing or the other. When Aviation Week magazine needed a cover image to highlight Spirit reaching the summit of Husband hill, a group of enthusiasts produced a striking Navcam mosaic that wasn’t a scientifically accurate product, but it was an artistic, enticing visualization that told the story, an image that then went on (like many other amateur products) to be featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day, and was reproduced in New Scientist, a newspaper from Belgium, and more.
Putting those images out there, giving people access to information about the missions from the first person perspective rather than relying on news media to relay events to the public, has turned the game on its head. And you know what? I think Europe is finally beginning to get it. I think key figures within ESA are realizing the potential benefits of letting people see space exploration unfold in real time, and see it for the difficult, challenging and rewarding process that it is. They may not have the resources to do everything they might like to, but they are beginning to get the message that to do good outreach, you have to let people in. Random paper of the day: "Hubble Space Telescope and New-Horizons simultaneous observations: Evidence of particle acceleration in the Jovian magnetotail" September 25 : Small update for a small asteroidRita Schulz presented an brief overview of the Rosetta flyby of asteroid Šteins this morning (full paper here -- which had to be submitted before the flyby even took place). Schulz admitted that she wouldn’t be showing anything new, but there were a few little interesting factoids that I don’t think we’ve seen before.
Unknown to enthusiasts watching the flyby via the Rosetta Blog, all was not well with Rosetta's automated onboard tracking. As Rosetta approached, it imaged Šteins to track its motion against the background stars. If the automated tracking were working correctly, Šteins should appear to not move. But hot pixels on the CCD were even brighter than Šteins was, and so the software was confused as to which dot was Šteins. [That is, a few pixels on the camera's detector always appear spuriously bright; nearly CCDs suffer from this problem to a greater or lesser extent. --ESL] Three hours before the flyby, the engineers at ESOC took something of a gamble and elected to continue with the automated tracking after tweaking some of the code to selectively read out parts of the camera's detector to avoid the hot pixels. The payoff was, as we have all seen, well worth the risk, and the technology has now been demonstrated ready for the next asteroid flyby in 2010. On the science front, the dust detector instrument, GIADA, detected no dust grains. ROSINA, an ion and neutral mass spectrometer, detected some gases, but only those produced by Rosetta itself, and there was no plasma detected. Further science results will have to wait at least until the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting to be held in Ithaca, New York in a few weeks' time. And this might put a smile on Emily's face: Schulz finished with her composite image of scaled small bodies! September 25: Monitoring Venus with the VMCWhilst out at the red planet, the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) has recently turned the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera back on, at Venus, another VMC -- this time the acronym stands for Venus Monitoring Camera -- has been keeping four eyes on Venus. Dmitri Titov talked about the VMC, a small, 1.25-kilogram (2.76-pound) instrument that projects four images onto one CCD. Each image is filtered separately, producing a ultraviolet (367 nanometers), visible (520 nanometers), and two infrared images (970 and 1000 nanometers). Onboard electronics pull out the desired quadrants of the image from the CCD and send only those parts back to Earth. As Venus Express tours in its elliptical orbit, VMC can image the entire planet within a single frame from its farthest reach (referred to as apocentre, 66,000 kilometers from Venus' center). Venus fills the frame by the time Venus Express is halfway in. And VMC achieves a highest resolution of 200 meters per pixel at pericentre (closest approach). Exposures can range from less than half a millisecond for daylight imaging, to half a minute for night-side imaging in the infrared. Before flight they were confident that direct solar illumination of the camera would not be a problem. However, Titov showed that some of their first light images were utterly ruined -- they looked like a picture of a brain instead of a planet. Fortunately, they were able to develop new flatfield techniques that now produce beautiful pictures of Venus. VMC has seen some quite dramatic changes, especially in the ultaviolet filter, of clouds. Clouds are smooth and elegant in the morning, but as they pass the sub-solar point, they tend to become turbulent and chaotic. Equatorial clouds are often quite mottled, perhaps a symptom of sulphuric acid droplets forming. In the polar regions, sometimes they see spiral arms, and sometimes the poles are crossed by dark streaks. They don't know what the origin of these is yet. They're just focused on making sure they just get lots of good images! They've used the VMC to look at the limb of Venus, but have not seen much in the way of detached layers such as we might see at Mars or Titan. By using another of Venus Express' instruments, VIRTIS, to examine minute slices of the electromagnetic spectrum that cross into wavelengths where carbon dioxide selectively absorbs light, they can produce elevation maps of the clouds and have seen them range from about 73 kilometers high in equatorial regions, to 65 kilometers nearer the poles. [By comparison, Earth's highest visible clouds are about 12 kilometers above the ground.] There is plenty to be seen in the ultraviolet imagery. While there is less detail immediately apparent with the visible and infared bands (contrast in visible and infrared images is only two to four percent, rather than 20 to 30 percent as for the ultraviolet images) they are still useful. Dimitri did mention, however, that they are looking for anyone who can help them process their data. I showed him Emily's preliminary work in producing one of her great PDS-to-public web pages and he was very pleased by it. I’m hoping that the talent of some of the people at unmannedspaceflight.com and elsewhere will be able to help the VMC team turn great pictures into great science!!!
September 26: Kaguya updateOn Friday Professor Manabu Kato, science manager for Kaguya gave an update on the mission (which it seems they still refer to as "Selene," given the layout of his Powerpoint slides). Most of you will have heard of and about Kaguya previously -- but a health report is certainly overdue!
Kaguya is probably most well known for carrying HDTV technology to the moon to record high definition video of flying over the lunar surface, and image Earth setting and rising over the limb of the Moon. To date, 60 minutes of HDTV footage has been downlinked. All the instruments except two are functioning well, the unspecified trouble being with the X-ray Spectrometer and Charged Particle Spectrometer. Kato showed a global Gamma Ray spectra that showed very strong spikes in uranium, aluminium, potassium, silicon, thorium, oxygen, titanium, and iron (see this abstract for more details ). They have had interruptions on GRS use, so to date have about three months of good analysis, and will build better-resolution maps of elemental distribution as time allows.
Their laser altimeter elevation data is at a coarser resolution, but they now have global coverage. This was demonstrated with both a single profile across a 2.5-kilometer-deep crater, and a stunningly sharp global elevation map. In a way similar to the radar sounding of Mars conducted by SHARAD on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MARSIS on Mars Express, Kaguya is getting radar profiles of the lunar surface. This was actually done previously by the Apollo command and service modules, but only in a few small equatorial regions and at a relatively low resolution of three kilometers per pixel. Kaguya is getting profiles at 500 meters per pixel, and they are trying to calibrate to better understand the signals they are getting. Kaguya deployed two sub-satellites while maneuvering into its final orbit, and by using Kaguya, the sub-satellites and the ground station as a four-way radio network, high-resolution gravity field maps have been produced of the near side and, uniquely, the far side. The gravity map showed some localized gravitational highs on the near side, but the far side is noisier, with highs at large crater rims. Apollo crater is a local gravity low, whereas Mare Serenitatis is a high gravity anomaly. The first of the sub-satellites will impact the moon next February, on the lunar far side. It is because of the slightly lumpy nature of the very gravity field it’s designed to map that its orbit will decay. Kaguya is clearly getting very, very good science, and as the first spacecraft of the International Lunar Decade, it’s setting a high bar for the missions that have already followed, and are yet to join in. There is not a great deal of finished science to be drawn from ‘update’ presentations such as this one, but at this stage, it’s enough to know that the spacecraft is there, working, and sending back great data! September 26: Europlanet Wrap-upSome of you may have noticed that my reports from Europlanet were perhaps a little thinner on pure science than last year. With the Division of Planetary Sciences conference not too far in the future [on October 10-15], many people were clearly holding their scientific cards close to their chests. One speaker was even bold enough to outright admit, mid-presentation, “I won't be showing you anything new.” Other people who frequented the press office agreed that it wasn’t a conference for revelation. Two things that I wanted to highlight but didn’t get around to were the MetNet project, and the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) mission design.
TSSM is what has evolved as the international version of the Titan Explorer, TANDEM and other flavors of next flagship mission involving the Saturn system. It’s only fair to say that other outer planet flagship missions are available. The competition to TSSM comes in the form of an independent pair of spacecraft: a NASA one to orbit Europa, and an ESA one to orbit Ganymede. All week long, little side-references were made about one target or the other, but I do get a feeling that the consensus is for Titan.
That brings to a close my reporting for Europlanet. You can hear a little more of my Münster exploits on this week's Planetary Radio. However, I will admit that I was on a mission this time around, and that mission wasn’t entirely to blog my fingers off. At Europlanet last year, I was a science-conference rookie and was treading quite carefully, being careful not to offend any fellow Europeans. This year, a little more confident around people I had seen on the news after spaceflight events such as the Huygens landing or the flight of SMART-1, I was trying to make my message heard a little more. I won't pretend that I have been happy with how much outreach European scientists have been doing over the past few years. It’s also naïve to think that without the Mars Exploration Rovers setting, and Cassini, New Horizons, and Phoenix following, a new standard for how to do this, we would have such high (and as yet unrequited) expectations of public outreach from European missions. Having said all that, I have noticed a change over the last 12 months. I think we’re already a long way from my trying to blog my way through the Rosetta Mars Flyby without Internet access, and without the science team taking the opportunity to take a few more pretty pictures. Now we have ESA regularly blogging key events (such as every Rosetta flyby since, and the recent Automated Transfer Vehicle spacecraft de-orbit). Key scientists are clearly beginning to understand that letting the public inside their missions is to be welcomed, not feared. I left Europlanet with the business card of a Venus Express scientist who said “Tell me what you need...” That was as surprising as it was exciting. He was astonished by Emily’s work to get their PDS-released data and throw it online so people can access and enjoy it as easily as possible. Not everyone is onboard, but some are. They won't all come onboard unless they hear that we want them to, so if you’re a European and you want to hear more about what your money is doing within ESA, write to your government's science minister (or equivalent) telling them that you support ESA, you support their activities in space science, and you would like to see more outreach, more openness and more interaction between the public and planetary science. I’ll close with my thanks to Emily for letting me borrow the blog for the week, Mat for letting the dictator-for-life onto the airwaves, and you readers for putting up with it all. Keep exploring -- you never know what we might find over the next hill. For the latest news and pictures from missions exploring our solar system, visit The Planetary Society Weblog! |
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